Wawashi

Wawashi is a character from the Kishin Douji Zenki series. He is a light brown mouse/minotaur beastman wearing purple leather gloves and an indigo loincloth. His lower body sports a cow's tail and he has hoves for feet. Wawashi has a humanlike body wearing armor with thorns on its shoulder pads.

In the manga, his armor is black with a Hyouinomi showing from his chest and Wawashi has a minotaur's head. He also attacks by charging at and chomping his foes with his fierce jaws.

Ingame, his armor is white, the Hyouinomi can't be seen and Wawashi has a mouse's head instead. While he keeps the fierce jaws from his manga incarnation, he ironically never uses them to bite the player ingame, instead wielding a staff with two pointy metal edges on each end as the weapon of his choice.

He is also only half the size of his manga counterpart and way less of a brute.

Manga
Wawashi makes his initial appearance at page 20 of Volume 4. He starts out as a pale, middle aged man with short, black hair and black eyes, who is in love with Nozomi and wants to sleep with her.

It is unknown, if he is a stalker or if they had a close relationship with each other. When the Inugami Roh and the Shitennou notice Wawashi's strong desire, Roh decides to give Hiki Hyouinomi.

Hiki then sends out the Hyouinomi, so it fuses with Wawashi in an attempt to transform a him into a Hyouijuu.

When the reader gets to the scene, Wawashi is already in mid-transformation with spikes growing out of his body while he keeps grunting and yelling. Shortly afterwards, he calls out "You... Wo... man..." and the Hyouinomi starts to glow. It then fully transforms him into a monster twice a human's size.

He roars and scares Nozomi. When she reaches out for Roh and begs for help, the Inogami Roh ignores her pleas. He then explains, that the desire of Wawashi, who has been transformed by the Hyouinomi, was to sleep with her and, that the Hyoinomi can not become whole until it has absorbed her.

Shortly afterwards, Wawashi attacks her from behind and chomps into her upper body. In the second next panel, he can be seen eating her gored remains. (not shown in the gallery below here due to rather graphic violence)

When Wawashi turns around to attack Roh, the latter shots a beam through Wawashi's chest, killing him immediately. Roh then gets hold of the Hyounomi, which he throws at Kokutei, who eats it while featuring a proud expression on his face.

Easy and Normal Mode
Ingame, Wawashi doubles as the first enemy and the first boss encountered ingame.

As such, he moves rather slowly and isn't much of a challenge compared to follow up enemies, but regardless of the chosen difficulty, he shouldn't be underestimated, as he can quickly take off the player's health if they don't manage to get used to the controls fast enough.

The main difference between easy mode and normal mode Wawashi is, that his easy mode counterpart moves a bit slower and is slightly less eager to attack the player.

Despite this, he will still use the same attacks as his normal mode counterpart.

If the player attempts to close in and attack Wawashi him in melee combat range, Wawashi will attempt to foil them by spinning his staff. Obviously, he uses this more often in normal mode than in easy mode.

His spinning staff attack will cause any brawling or aerial melee moves to fail badly with Chibi Zenki getting himself hurt. If Chiaki attempts to fight Wawashi, he will use the same move to block her fireballs.

If Wawashi closes in on the player instead, he will try to kick them with his hoves.

Sometimes, Wawashi will also start jumping to avoid the player's attacks.

To defeat Wawashi, the player has to block or avoid Wawashi's attacks and use their moves counter against him when Wawashi is taking a short timeout.

Once Wawashi's health has been depleted, he will be defeated and the player will encounter Marubasu for the first time.

Marubasu can't be fought at this point and will warp Chibi Zenki, Chiaki and Nozomi into an alternate reality.

Afterwards, the game will save and allow the player to continue the game from this point onwards, should they quit or lose all of their lives (aka CREDITS). The game saves very quickly. As such, this is barely noticable.

Now, the player will be dragged into the next boss battle and first encounter with Endoku.

Hard Mode
In hard mode, Wawashi is way more mobile than in easy or normal mode and will almost constantly keep jumping all over the place and attempt to attack or counterattack the player at any chance he gets.

He also gains a few additional attacks like using his kick while jumping and will often attempt to strike at the player with his staff.

His erratic behaviour makes hard mode Wawashi a very difficult opponent for Zenki players, as Zenki can only use melee attacks in his chibi form. Though, ironically the opposite is also true for Chiaki, as her ranged attacks make easy for a skilled Chiaki player to take Wawashi down with well timed fireball shots as he will constantly jump into them instead of blocking them like his easy and normal mode counterparts.

Appearance(s)

 * Wawashi is one of the characters whose colors and slight details differ between appearances. He shares this trait with the Inugami Roh, Guren and Goki.
 * He appears in the ending image for the normal difficulty setting, where he can briefly be seen in the bottom left corner. He is very easy to miss in this appearance.

Thanks

 * Thanks to Semerone for...
 * ...writing this article.
 * ...adding the ingame spriteart featuring Wawashi, as he appears in Vajura Fight.
 * ...creating an English translation of the manga pages featuring Wawashi's manga counterpart.